I was in the zone -- or flow -- for the first time today with Skritter. Normally I either make too many mistakes, or it's too easy, so it was interesting being in the middle. Is this the ideal mental state? It only lasted a few minutes though, before I broke out of my trance.

Cool! Do you know what % readiness your words were averaging while you were in this state?

Your Skritter sessions will tend to start off harder and get easier, becoming too easy if you overpractice without adding. If this is typically miscalibrated (you feel like you should be getting more or less prompts wrong), you can change your target retention rate, which should eventually adjust your frequency of missing a prompt:
http://www.skritter.com/account/settings-language

Not really. I think it's because I did two Skritter sessions and I still had some residual characters stuck inside my brain.

yeah doing multiple skritter sessions helps a lot.

I　have been sick for three days and bored as fuck, so skrittered away and after clearing my 1000+ review queue I learned 90+ new characters in two days AND overpracticed. I'm even itching to add more but better not ... or just fuck it, i will.

It's all about time actually. Working in a bar every night does not mix well with studying, but when I'm on a roll, I gooooooooooo.....

I read on this forum about people who add 5 to 10 new characters a day. I must say, if I could study everyday this would be good, albeit a little low. But my method is more like adding a lot when I feel good and just dealing with huge reviews later. I can always cope and it makes me feel like i am moving so fast hahaa. Got me from 600 to 1300 in no time. 2000 here we come.

Do you guys also feel that the more you know the easier you can learn new ones? (I guess until you reach a certain limit)

That last question would be interesting to hear an answer to. If it really is the case that the more you know the easier you can learn new characters, I would be really happy. I am a relative beginner, with 560 characters learned (writing), and a pretty slow learner. Adding 5-10 characters a day would be impossible for me, I think.

i must mention that i can speak much more than i can write by hand, and i have seen characters for a long time everywhere around me. so maybe i was exagerating.

however if i skritter every day for a period of time i can cope with adding more than that on average, but i always try to overpractice after adding and keep the review for my next few days as low as possible. The downside is that when i am busy or lazy, i will have a queue of up to two thousand characters which IS demotivating and takes me a couple of days to get through.

but unless i just want to clear my review and don't have extra time, i am not happy without adding.

I for one definitely think the more you know the easier, at least up until the level where i am at now. you know most components and you get a feeling for the combinations like a second nature.

I wonder where this stops to be the case though. If it ever does.

"Do you guys also feel that the more you know the easier you can learn new ones?"

Of course. Think about how long it takes little kids to learn the alphabet compared to the effort it takes you to learn a new word. You've also memorized a lot of low-level details -- like stroke order -- so you can concentrate on higher level details.

There's a psychological term called "chunking" that describes what you are probably doing. Instead of thinking about every single stroke for a character you are able to take the pieces of what you know and glue them together like legos.

@Tove, to second what icecream said, once you've learned 耳, 王, and 德 it's easy to look at something complicated like 聽 and relate all of its pieces to characters you already know. This process snowballs until you can remember pretty much any new character as an arrangement of radicals or other characters. So yeah, it does get easier.

I learned 雕 100 times more quickly than I learn 你. 你 was the first character I ever learned. When Chinese people learn a new character, they break it down to its parts. Their brain fills in the details of each chunk so in essence they are writing a 2 part fill in the blanks whereas a novice foreigner might be writing a 15 stroke nightmare. It gets much easier, don't worry.

I first learned 雕 and it was easy. Then, I learned 彫, and then 鵰 and then 琱 and then 凋 and then … No, it’s not.